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Liam Howlett continued promotion for his new Prodigy album ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ this week with a pantomine style assault on mainstream dance music.
“I still fucking hate house music, a lot of this new album may be club music but it ain’t nothing to do with house music,” The Prodigy producer told DJ magazine.
“It’s inspired by the era before house- people like Tom Tom Club and D- Train, real fucking club sounds,” he spat.
His enthusiastic support for Tom Tom Club matched the views of Slam star Orde Meikle, who told Skrufff this week, he considers them as key inspirations behind the Scottish duo’s music.
“Wordy Rappinghood is one of the seminal all-time songs, it rings all kinds of bells in our early musical development,” said Orde.
“The beats, the hooks, the sounds and the overall feel of the track were amazing; it was fresh and happy, it had so much in it and it caught both our ears. It reminds us of a really eclectic era.”
Orde was also considerably less dismissive of the house and techno scene that Slam have made their name in, though agreed that clubland is entering new era.
“One of the happier aspects of the changes taking place is that some of the topper echelons of dance music might be pushed aside,” he predicted.
One of the problems was that the dance scene became so fragmented and so many people would only listen to a certain sound and go to a certain club and I find that problematic, though our DJ sets have become narrower over time,” he continued.
But what’s happening now is part of a progression. Certain scenes reach a point where they no longer seem to be progressing, they have a short period while they treat water, then sure enough something fresh comes through, and that’s where I think we are with a lot of genres of dance music. People are looking around for other influences.”
Both Slam’s new album Year Zero and the Prodigy’s ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ are out on Monday August 23 (in the UK)
